Thirteen or 14 years ago I admired, out loud, a book I found on a shelf in Matt Carter's office. That Christmas I was pleasantly surprised to find that Matt had found another copy of the book and he gave it to me. The book was about the life of Oswald Cooper and it contained numerous specimens of Cooper's lettering jobs. Among them was an interesting image of 7 letter that spelled out the word 'Robusto'. These letters were used as the model for the font Robusto. All I needed to do was develop 221 other glyphs to finish the font.

This double-wide wonder is based on Oswald Cooper’s original drawings for the typeface Cooper Fullface. ATF rejected this offering because they felt that several of the letterforms, and particularly the numbers, were a little too wacky for the mainstream. By now, you know that such an accusation is a "Please don't throw me in the briar patch" plea to yours truly. So, here, proudly and true to their designer’s original intent, are two versions of a really fun font. Both versions of this font include the complete Unicode 1252 Latin and Unicode 1250 Central European character sets.

Royal Typeface is stylish copperplate fonts, combines from copperplate to contemporary font with a dancing baseline, classic and elegant touch. Can be used for various purposes. Such as headings, luxury, logos, wedding invitation, t-shirt, letterhead, lable, news, posters, badges etc. Royal Typeface features 1.500 glyphs. Support with Opentype: Unique glyphs, With cool Stylistic Alternates, Swash, Italics, Stylistic Sets 1-20, Ligatures, Multilingual characters, UPPERCASE, LowerCase, Numeric, Oldstyle Figures & Tabular Figures.

Breesh font is a dancing handwriting, quickly trace with a pointed brush. The inspiration come from both asian calligraphy, italic and copperplate alphabets.

Cooper Black's second coming to American design in the mid-sixties, after almost four decades of slumber, can arguably be credited with (or, depending on design ideology, blamed for) the domino effect that triggered the whole art nouveau pop poster jam of the 1960s and 1970s. By the early 1970s, though Cooper Black still held its popular status (and, for better or for worse, still does), countless so-called hippie and funk faces were competing for packaging and paper space. The American evolution of the genre would trip deeper into psychedelia, drawing on a rich history of flared, flourished and rounded design until it all dwindled and came to a halt a few years into the 1980s. But the European (particularly German) response to that whole display type trend remained for the most part cool and reserved, drawing more on traditional art nouveau and art deco sources rather than the bottomless jug of new ideas being poured on the other side of the pond. One of the humorous responses to the "hamburgering" of typography was Friedrich Poppl's Poppl Heavy, done in 1972, when Cooper Black was celebrating its 50th anniversary. It is presented here in a fresh digitization under the name Gator (a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ray Kroc, the father of the fast food chain). To borrow the title of a classic rock album, Gator is meaty, beaty, big and bouncy. It is one of the finest examples of how expressively animated a thick brush can be, and one of the better substitutes to the much overused Cooper Black. Gator comes in all popular font formats, and sports an extended character set covering the majority of Latin-based languages. Many alternates and ligatures are included in the font.

Georges Peignot designed the font Nicolas Cochin based on copper engravings of the 18th century and Charles Malin cut the typeface in 1912 for the Paris foundry Deberny & Peignot. The font is named after the French engraver Charles Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790) although its style had little to do with that of the copper artist. Nicholas Cochin is a freer variation of another Peignot font, Cochin, a bit more balanced and elegant.

Create fantastic headers for your invitations, business cards - or design stand out labels or gift tags. This font has been handmade and executed with a dip pen in Copperplate style calligraphy.

Pompeian Cursive is a calligraphically-inspired display typeface featuring a limited number of alternate characters and a handful of graceful ligatures. A lively set of non-lining numerals accompanies, as well as a few calligraphically-inspired flourishes for ornament. The history of this typeface: Oswald Cooper’s relationship with the Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry was one instigated under the auspices of creating new styles of type in lieu of following stylistic trends. In 1927, BB&S requested that Cooper create a script-like cursive typeface design in step with Lucien Bernhard’s Schoenschrift and ATF’s similarly-styled Liberty typeface. In response to BB&S’s desire to emulate instead of innovate, Cooper wrote to Mcarthur, “I am desolated to see Barnhart’s hoist the black flag. Your own efforts through the years to boost the foundry into a place in the sun as an originator seem wasted.” Still, Cooper took up the task at hand, creating a delicate, sophisticated type design which he named Pompeian Cursive. The typeface featured a limited number of alternate characters and a handful of graceful ligatures. A lively set of non-lining numerals accompanied, as well as a few calligraphically-inspired flourishes for ornamenting the end of lines of type accompanied the typeface, as well. By reviewing the few remaining original drawings for the type, as well as copious samples of Pompeian Cursive from both Cooper & BB&S' proofing process and period-specific type specimens, Wordshape presents the first digital version of this classic hybrid script/sans typeface, complete with all original alternate characters and ornaments. Pompeian Cursive has been intensively spaced and kerned for the finest setting for weddings, announcements, and general display work. - What was the inspiration for designing the font? While researching a biographic essay for Japan’s IDEA Magazine, I came across the original proofs and drawings for Pompeian Cursive. While a number of foundries have released interpretations of Cooper’s assorted typefaces, they stray from the original rather dramatically in parts. Cooper is without a doubt my favorite type and lettering designer, and to bring a refined return to his original intentions is an immense gift. - What are its main characteristics and features? Pompeian Cursive is a typeface which functions as both a display face and a limited text face. It features classy, thoughtful, and delicate swash capitals and rugged lowercase characters with a low x-height and gracefully long ascenders and descenders. - Usage recommendations: Display type or text-setting. Perfect for newspaper work, editorial design, materials intended to invoke an "old-timey" flavor, or just about anything in need of personality.

Tomi Haaparanta got the idea for the Tyke typeface family after using Cooper Black for a design project. He liked Cooper's chubby design, but longed for a wider range of weights. “I wanted a typeface that was cuddly and friendly,” recalls Haaparanta, “but also one that was readable at text sizes.” He started tinkering with the idea, and Tyke began to emerge. Even though Haaparanta knew his boldest weight would equal the heft of Cooper Black, he began drawing the Tyke family with the medium. His goal was to refine the characteristics of the design at this moderate weight, and then build on it to create the light and bold extremes. Haaparanta got the spark to design type in 1990, when he attended a workshop held by Phil Baines at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. “I've been working and playing with type ever since,” Haaparanta recalls. He released his first commercial font in 1996, while working as an Art Director in Helsinki. After about two dozen more releases, he founded his own type studio, Suomi Type Foundry, early in 2004. At five weights plus corresponding italics, Tyke easily fulfills Haaparanta's goal of creating a wide range of distinctive, completely usable designs. The light through bold weights perform well at both large and small sizes, while the Black is an outstanding alternative to Cooper for display copy.

Lordela started with a custom lettering logo for a local tech company, finally rejected. It takes some inspiration from the copperplate calligraphy writing and the blackletter alphabets. Entirely designed with straight lines.

Larisch is a hand-lettered design by the Austrian calligrapher and teacher, Rudolf von Larisch. The original was used for the title page of the 1903 edition of Beispiele Kunstlerischer Schrift (Examples of Artistic Writing). Larisch is an attractive, casual set of caps of even strokes with rounded terminals. Except for the terminals, it is similar in style to Kunstler Grotesk. The numerals are lining or ranging figures, meaning they line up with the baseline, unlike old-style text figures. All are of equal width for setting up columns of numbers. The letters are well formed and easy to read, as you would expect from a writing master. Ligatures includes CH (123), CK (125), FT (135), LA (137), LO (167), OO (172), CO (177) and TT (181. An alternative O with underscore is provided at position 111. Friendly, but not fancy -- a very useful all-cap font.

Libelle is a 21st century English Copperplate Script typeface. Created by Jovica Veljović, a designer with decades of experience as a calligrapher, typeface designer, and professor, Libelle differentiates itself from other Copperplates Scripts because its letterforms are less mechanical. The hand of the calligrapher shows through the forms, breathing new life into this historic genre. Libelle includes approximately 400 extra glyphs, including alternate forms of many letters and special forms for the beginnings and ends of words. The font includes several stylistic sets, as well as ligatures and ornaments.

Commercial Script is a sophisticated copperplate script design. Its capitals are elaborate initials, and the lowercase letters join together in the style of real handwriting. Commercial Script's elegant refinement makes it a classic and ever-popular typeface. The spark behind this typeface comes from centries-old English Spencerian copperplate calligraphy. In 1985, the American typefoundry Barnhart Brothers & Spindler released a typeface in this style. This was redesigned by ATF's Morris Fuller Benton in 1906, and ATF released Commercial Script" in 1908. In 1994, Letraset' released this digital version of the typeface."

Commercial Script is a sophisticated copperplate script design. Its capitals are elaborate initials, and the lowercase letters join together in the style of real handwriting. Commercial Script's elegant refinement makes it a classic and ever-popular typeface. The spark behind this typeface comes from centries-old English Spencerian copperplate calligraphy. In 1985, the American typefoundry Barnhart Brothers & Spindler released a typeface in this style. This was redesigned by ATF's Morris Fuller Benton in 1906, and ATF released Commercial Script" in 1908. In 1994, Letraset' released this digital version of the typeface."

Tuscan Extended, from the William H. Page 1872 specimen book, provided the pattern for this unusual in-your-face face. Both versions of this font support the Latin 1262, Central European 1250, Turkish 1254 and Baltic 1257 codepages.

Royalist Pro is an expanded OpenType font based on "Secretary Hand" from the time of the English Civil War, circa 1632. This Pro version includes over 500 glyphs with alternate characters, ligatures and full Western and Central European Characters sets.

A revival based on the Harry Winters design 'Roslyn Gothic' released by VGC in 1972. We've added a new light weight and several alternate glyphs. Ryder Gothic contains all the high-end features expected in a quality OpenType Pro font.

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that these letter shapes are familiar. They have the unmistakable color and weight of Cooper Black, Oswald Cooper's most famous typeface from 1921. What should be a surprise is that these letters are actually from George Auriol's Robur Noir (or Robur Black), published in France circa 1909 by the Peignot foundry as a bolder, solid counterpart to its popular Auriol typeface (1901). This face precedes Cooper Black by a dozen of years and a whole Great War. Cooper Black has always been a bit of a strange typographical apparition to anyone who tried to explain its original purpose, instant popularity in the 1920s, and major revival in the late 1960s. BB&S and Oswald Cooper PR aside, it is quite evident that the majority of Cooper Black's forms did not evolve from Cooper Old Style, as its originators claimed. And the claim that it collected various Art Nouveau elements is of course too ambiguous to be questioned. But when compared with Robur Noir, the "elements" in question can hardly be debated. The chronology of this "machine age" ad face in metal is amusing and stands as somewhat of a general index of post-Great War global industrial competition: - 1901: Peignot releases Auriol, based on the handwriting of George Auriol (the "quintessential Art Nouveau designer," according to Steven Heller and Louise Fili), and it becomes very popular. - 1909-1912: Peignot releases the Robur family of faces. The eight styles released are Robur Noir and its italic, a condensed version called Robur Noir Allongée (Elongated) and its italic, an outline version called Clair De Lune and its condensed/elongated, a lined/striped version called Robur Tigre, and its condensed/elongated counterpart. - 1914 to 1918: World War One uses up economies on both sides of the Atlantic, claims Georges Peignot with a bullet to the forehead, and non-war industry stalls for 4 years. - 1921: BB&S releases Cooper Black with a lot of hype to hungry publishing, manufacturing and advertising industries. - 1924: Robert Middleton releases Ludlow Black. - 1924: The Stevens Shanks foundry, the British successor to the Figgins legacy, releases its own exact copies of Robur Noir and Robur Noir Allongée, alongside a lined version called Royal Lining. - 1925: Oswald Cooper releases his Cooper Black Condensed, with similar math to Robur Noir Allongée (20% reduction in width and vectical stroke). - 1925: Monotype releases Frederick Goudy's Goudy Heavy, an "answer to Cooper Black". Type historians gravely note it as the "teacher steals from his student" scandal. Goudy Heavy Condensed follows a few years later. - 1928: Linotype releases Chauncey Griffith's Pabst Extra Bold. The condensed counterpart is released in 1931. When type production technologies changed and it was time to retool the old faces for the Typositor age, Cooper Black was a frontrunning candidate, while Robur Noir was all but erased from history. This was mostly due to its commercial revival by flourishing and media-driven music and advertising industries. By the late 1960s variations and spinoffs of Cooper Black were in every typesetting catalog. In the early- to mid-1970s, VGC, wanting to capitalize on the Art Nouveau onslaught, published an uncredited exact copy of Robur Black under the name Skylark. But that also went with the dust of history and PR when digital tech came around, and Cooper Black was once again a prime retooling candidate. The "old fellows stole all of our best ideas" indeed. So almost a hundred years after its initial fizz, Robur is here in digital form, to reclaim its rightful position as the inspiration for, and the best alternative to, Cooper Black. Given that its forms date back to the turn of the century, a time when foundry output had a closer relationship to calligraphic and humanist craft, its shapes are truer to brush strokes and much more idiosyncratic than Cooper Black in their totality's construct. Robur and Robur Italic come in all popular font formats. Language support includes Western, Central and Eastern European character sets, as well as Baltic, Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish, and Celtic/Welsh languages. A range of complementary f-ligatures and a few alternates letters are included within the fonts.

Marguerita is the work of designer David Quay, a pseudo-Latin, 1950s concept based on a copperplate script. The capitals are meant as initials only. Marguerita is idea when a cheerful, light-hearted effect is desired.

Mamba is inspired by Cooper Black.

A bastard of the font Cooper.

Georges Peignot designed Cochin based on copper engravings of the 18th century and Charles Malin cut the typeface in 1912 for the Paris foundry Deberny & Peignot. The font is named after the French engraver Charles Nicolas Cochin (1715–1790) although its style had little to do with that of the copper artist’s. The font displays a curious mix of style elements and could be placed as a part of the typographical Neorenaissance movement. Cochin is especially large and wide and was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century.

The Athallia is a lovely calligraphy font. It comes with amazing alternates and is a mixture from copperplate calligraphy with hand-lettering styles. It was designed to covey elegance and has an attractive, smooth, clean, feminine, sensual style.

This face was designed in 1925 as the Monotype answer to the very popular Cooper Black. Goudy is also quite similar in appearance to Ludlow Black and Pabst Extra Bold, both of which were also done in response to Cooper Black.

A modern cutting designed to give the appearance of an old wood type. The letters were cut as linoleum blocks about 2 inches high, then duplicated as copper electrotypes. Used for some Ringling Bros. circus work.

Kasmine is a handwritten stylish copperplate calligraphy font with a dancing baseline and a classic and elegant touch. Can be used for various purposes. such as headings, signature, logos, wedding invitations, t-shirts, letterheads, signage, labels, news, posters, badges etc.

Wulkie Font is handwritten stylish fonts, combines from copperplate to contemporary typeface with a dancing baseline, classic and elegant touch. Can be used for various purposes. such as headings, signature, logos, wedding invitation, t-shirt, letterhead, signage, lable, news, posters, badges etc.

Grosvenor is part of the Staunton Script Family of fonts designed by Ted Staunton for his historic novel centered around a family bible and the handwritten annotation through seven generations. The Grosvenor font is a loose script based on copperplate writing circa late 1800s.

Palace Script is a formal English script from the 1920s. This typeface, inspired by centuries-old copperplate engravings, could add the perfect touch to any number of holiday cards. You could also make cute little names tags for all of your presents with Palace Script.

Coptek is the work of David Quay and gets its name from the high tech look imposed on the design of copperplate script. The capitals are initials which fit well with a lower case alphabet whose letters join in the style of true handwriting.

First inspired in a leaf from Missale Romanum ex Decreto Sanctrosancti Concilii Tridentinii Restitutum, printed by the Plantin Workshop at Antwerp in 1642, Musee was designed for booktext purposes and is very elegant and highly readable even in small sizes. Includes plenty of OpenType features, like SmallCaps, Alternates and Swashes.

Diploma Script was born from merging classic calligraphy and contemporary tools. The Copperplate style, which served as baseline for the development of the font, mixes harmoniously with brush pen drawing techniques that give Diploma Script a modern touch. The typeface provides elegance and legibility, while preserving characteristic shapes and strokes from the Copperplate style. Diploma Script covers a wide range of uses ranging from titles, logotypes, invitation cards, certificates and labels to small-sized texts. The family comes with initial, medial and terminal alternates that allow user to emphasize specific words. Figures, fractions and symbols are also included. Diploma Script includes a set containing more than 900 characters that support over 200 different languages.

Gradl Highstep is an archetypical Art Nouveau face by the prolific and mysterious Max Joseph Gradl. It epitomizes the visual language of elegance and sophistication. It seems strange that so little information is available today about Max Gradl: He seems to have been well known in his day. In addition to his jewelry design, he did advertising work for customers in Naples, London and New York in addition to customers in cities all over Germany. Gradl Highstep is an all-cap font with a wide range of ligatures: 094=SA, 123=CH, 125=CK, 126=TS, 167=FA, 172=PA, 177=TA, 188=WA and 190=YA. In addtion, 137=Gradl’s dated monogram “MJG 1903,” 175=LLC abbreviation, 181=alternate S. This is a subtle font with thin, variable strokes. It is best used at 28 points and larger to give it the presence it needs to be be appreciated. Gradl Highstep Initials is a companion font, incorporating a deft line drawing of a fashionable woman of the period who is every bit as elegant as the underlying font.

ITC Ozwald was designed by David Farey and is a revival of a little-known typeface of American type designer Oswald Cooper called Cooper Fullface. The original was intended to be a modernized version of Bodoni and Farey captured all the charm, wit and creativity of the original in ITC Ozwald.